London, Dec 1 (IANS) Acclaimed American writer Jonathan Littell has won the Literary Review’s 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a novel that judges described as a “work of genius”.
The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Nazi Holocaust through the eyes of an executioner, won France’s highest literary honour the Prix Goncourt in 2006 and has sold over a million copies in Europe.

The judges paid tribute to the novel’s breadth and ambition, calling it “in part, a work of genius”.

“However,” the citation continued, “a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as ‘I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg’ clinched the award for The Kindly Ones.

“We hope he takes it in good humour.”

Littell beat off a field that included literary luminary and fellos-American Philip Roth for a passage that begins: “This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head”.

The award was set up by the late Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh in 1993 to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.

Other nominees for the award this year were: Paul Theroux (A Dead Hand), Nick Cave (The Death of Bunny Munro), Philip Roth (The Humbling), Amos Oz (Rhyming Life and Death), John Banville (The Infinities), Anthony Quinn (The Rescue Man), Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter), Sanjida O’Connell (The Naked Name of Love) and Richard Milward (Ten Storey Love Song).